“The Perils of Indifference” In April, 1945, Elie Wiesel was liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp after struggling with hunger, beatings, losing his entire family, and narrowly escaping death himself. He at first remained silent about his experiences, because it was too hard to relive them. However, eventually he spoke up, knowing it was his duty not to let the world forget the tragedies resulting from their silence. He wrote Night, a memoir of his and his family’s experience, and began using his freedom to spread the word about what had happened and hopefully prevent it from happening again. In 1999, he was invited to speak at the Millennium Lectures, in front of the president, first lady, and other important governmental figures,. In his speech, “The Perils of Indifference”, he uses rhetoric devices to get emotional responses and to connect with the audience. He wants to create awareness of the dangers of indifference and show how there needs to be change. His speech eloquently calls out the government for their lack of response during the Holocaust, and warns against continued disregard for the struggles of others. He sees indifference as being the ally of the enemy, and without compassion there is no hope for the victims.
Throughout the speech, Wiesel utilizes a wide range of tones and uses strategic pauses so the audience experiences no difficulties in understanding the struggle he went through. He uses a wide range of well-placed emotions to help in making his point, as well as helping them feel how he felt during his struggles. Furthermore, Wiesel pauses to allow his words to sink in, which creates tension and suspense that stress the importance of what he is saying. While he recounts the story of the boy being freed, Wiesel’s tone is grateful when he mentions the Americans who saw what they went through, hopeful when he talks about being “finally free” (Wiesel), and all emotion drains from his voice when he says “there was no joy in his heart” (Wiesel). He wants to distinguish the range of emotions he experienced and really make the audience understand the hardships that he went through.
Elie Wiesel shows himself to be qualified to speak for the victims of injustices with his references to the camps and his survival of it. The ethos from this allows him to gain credibility with the audience so they are more likely to listen to what he is saying and truly believe in it. Wiesel is a known author, with a bestselling book, Night, which is considered a “Seminal work on the terrors of the Holocaust” (Biography.com), because of how it clearly depicted the holocaust from the perspective of a young boy who lost his family. Also, when Wiesel begins discussing “the place that [he] came from” (Wiesel), he once again demonstrates that he has personal experience of the oppression and the horrors of the Holocaust. In his camp, he says, the people are separated into “the killers, the victims, and the bystanders” (Wiesel). He was a part of the “victims” group, so he has insight on how they were equally affected by both the killers and their bystanders. The killers were the initial torturers, but the lack of compassion from the bystanders was its own type of pain for them. Wiesel includes himself in the pain, saying it was “Our only miserable consolation that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets” (Wiesel, emphasis added), because there was no way that they would allow such horrors to continue. Consequently, when he says “We knew, we learned, we discovered” (Wiesel, emphasis added) that the government actually did know about what happened to them, he relives the shock and dismay he felt as he came to the realization that they were not a secret, they were just deemed unimportant and ignored.
In addition to his personal experiences, Wiesel’s references to other respected people also allow him to establish credibility by placing himself in their favor. Similarly, when he mentions infamous events that have taken place that typically inspire feelings of guilt and sympathy, he is able to transfer those emotions into what he is talking about. Wiesel is surrounded by people who would support Roosevelt as president, so he remains polite in his opinions of him, never accusing him of anything directly. Roosevelt was distracted by the aftermath of the Great Depression, so he did not devote as much attention towards the concentration camps (Ushmm.com), but Wiesel carefully avoids placing blame. He does admit that Roosevelt’s image is “flawed” (Wiesel) because of his lack of response to the Nazi aggression towards Jews. However, he implies that he has the support of the former president because his “very much present to me and to us” (Wiesel). This insinuates that he has the support of Roosevelt in what he is suggesting for the current president, transferring the respect they held for the previous president onto him. Similarly, he manages to transfer the horror one may feel in relation to the wars, assassinations, and “bloodbaths” (Wiesel) in different places around the world. People may have less knowledge about the Holocaust than one of these other conflicts, so by listing it not only together, but on an even worse level, he finds a way to show how hard the Holocaust was in comparison.
Wiesel employs logical tactics to dissuade the idea of indifference and silence in the government by revealing the negative effects on the people of the holocaust. One of the most chilling ideas to think about for American citizens today, is that Jews escaped to America, and were actually turned away and sent back to be massacred by the Nazis. Even the smallest amount of sympathy would have saved over one thousand people from the wrath of Hitler. Being such a large amount of people, this number helps Wiesel sway his listeners towards his argument, because if America was doing the right thing, so many people should not have suffered. He also uses logic and tugs at emotions together when talking about how abandoned the Jews in the camps felt. They all believed that they were left there, unaided, because they were a secret. Logically, if any powerful country with any morals knew of their plight, it is assumed that they would send help. Surely, if they knew, they would have “spoken out” (Wiesel), but they did not. Elie Wiesel includes a dictionary definition of indifference in the beginning of the speech, saying it is simply “no difference” (Wiesel). He presents it as being wholly true, to sway the audience towards agreeing with what he believes the word entails. To him, indifference implies a lack of humanity, hatred without emotion or passion. Because of the confident manner in which he proclaims this, it is difficult for anyone listening to believe otherwise.
The pathos in the speech comes partially from where Wiesel personifies his memories of the concentration camps and brutality as a little boy who has experienced far too much to ever be happy again, as well as where he details the people in the camp and how they felt. However, the main source of empathy comes from the starvation and punishments they experienced. Wiesel begins the speech with the story of a boy, freed but forever scarred. It is clear to the audience that this is Wiesel when he was young and newly liberated. He mentions the American soldiers to establish a connection with those he is addressing. Wiesel stresses the importance of the “Gratitude” (Wiesel) that he felt towards them, and showed how even the presence of others helped lessen the burden and loneliness. It was no longer only him, there was now others to “bear witness” (Wiesel) and remember what they saw. The worst of the prisoners were called the Muselmanner, the most broken of the victims. They are those who have “lapsed into a state of despairing apathy” (forward.com). The brutality led to a complete loss of hope, until they reached the point where they “felt nothing” (Wiesel). In Wiesel’s beliefs, if one feels nothing, it is akin to being dead. So when he later comments that those who watched the Holocaust happen with indifference, he implies that they do not feel, connecting them with the lifeless shells of the Muselmanner. Not feeling, he declares in one of his more effective points, is far worse than anger or hatred. Anger and hatred can inspire emotion, action, progress, while indifference “is never creative” and “elicits no response” (Wiesel). No response, to those who are simply waiting for someone to help them, says that not only are they being tortured by one group of people, but the other does not care enough to stop them.
Wiesel views indifference as going against religion and God. If a person is indifferent, then they are going against humanity. In one of his more intense moments of the speech, he begins talking about how much worse being ignored was, versus unjustly judged. Religion may be unjust, but it is not indifferent. People cannot live “Outside God” (Wiesel), they need Him even if He is far away. To the people in the concentration camps, apathy is a “harsher punishment” (Wiesel) than anger or rage, because anger has feeling in it, while indifference just makes a suffering person feel even smaller and more insignificant. Indifference in humans potentially goes against religion, because it blurs the lines between “light and darkness” (Wiesel).
Throughout his speech at the Millennium Lectures, Elie Wiesel both enlightens on the consequences of apathy towards those who need help, and inspires hope for a better future. He wants to inspire better choices for the future presidents, and he uses a combination of logic, ethos and pathos to make his speech more effective. Wiesel sees indifference as more dangerous than any other emotion, as it both lessens a person’s humanity and distances them from their fellow people. He shows his audience how he feels through the emotions he uses when presenting his ideas, as well as painting them a picture of a young Elie Wiesel, struggling through the terrors of the Holocaust without any family, hoping only for rescue. He effectively makes his point about the dangers that come when people do not care for each other, and simultaneously calls the people to action, inspiring them to change the way America will respond to such situations in the future.
In April, 1945, Elie Wiesel was liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp after struggling with hunger, beatings, losing his entire family, and narrowly escaping death himself. He at first remained silent about his experiences, because it was too hard to relive them. However, eventually he spoke up, knowing it was his duty not to let the world forget the tragedies resulting from their silence. He wrote Night, a memoir of his and his family’s experience, and began using his freedom to spread the word about what had happened and hopefully prevent it from happening again. In 1999, he was invited to speak at the Millennium Lectures, in front of the president, first lady, and other important governmental figures,. In his speech, “The Perils of Indifference”, he uses rhetoric devices to get emotional responses and to connect with the audience. He wants to create awareness of the dangers of indifference and show how there needs to be change. His speech eloquently calls out the government for their lack of response during the Holocaust, and warns against continued disregard for the struggles of others. He sees indifference as being the ally of the enemy, and without compassion there is no hope for the victims.
Throughout the speech, Wiesel utilizes a wide range of tones and uses strategic pauses so the audience experiences no difficulties in understanding the struggle he went through. He uses a wide range of well-placed emotions to help in making his point, as well as helping them feel how he felt during his struggles. Furthermore, Wiesel pauses to allow his words to sink in, which creates tension and suspense that stress the importance of what he is saying. While he recounts the story of the boy being freed, Wiesel’s tone is grateful when he mentions the Americans who saw what they went through, hopeful when he talks about being “finally free” (Wiesel), and all emotion drains from his voice when he says “there was no joy in his heart” (Wiesel). He wants to distinguish the range of emotions he experienced and really make the audience understand the hardships that he went through.
Elie Wiesel shows himself to be qualified to speak for the victims of injustices with his references to the camps and his survival of it. The ethos from this allows him to gain credibility with the audience so they are more likely to listen to what he is saying and truly believe in it. Wiesel is a known author, with a bestselling book, Night, which is considered a “Seminal work on the terrors of the Holocaust” (Biography.com), because of how it clearly depicted the holocaust from the perspective of a young boy who lost his family. Also, when Wiesel begins discussing “the place that [he] came from” (Wiesel), he once again demonstrates that he has personal experience of the oppression and the horrors of the Holocaust. In his camp, he says, the people are separated into “the killers, the victims, and the bystanders” (Wiesel). He was a part of the “victims” group, so he has insight on how they were equally affected by both the killers and their bystanders. The killers were the initial torturers, but the lack of compassion from the bystanders was its own type of pain for them. Wiesel includes himself in the pain, saying it was “Our only miserable consolation that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets” (Wiesel, emphasis added), because there was no way that they would allow such horrors to continue. Consequently, when he says “We knew, we learned, we discovered” (Wiesel, emphasis added) that the government actually did know about what happened to them, he relives the shock and dismay he felt as he came to the realization that they were not a secret, they were just deemed unimportant and ignored.
In addition to his personal experiences, Wiesel’s references to other respected people also allow him to establish credibility by placing himself in their favor. Similarly, when he mentions infamous events that have taken place that typically inspire feelings of guilt and sympathy, he is able to transfer those emotions into what he is talking about. Wiesel is surrounded by people who would support Roosevelt as president, so he remains polite in his opinions of him, never accusing him of anything directly. Roosevelt was distracted by the aftermath of the Great Depression, so he did not devote as much attention towards the concentration camps (Ushmm.com), but Wiesel carefully avoids placing blame. He does admit that Roosevelt’s image is “flawed” (Wiesel) because of his lack of response to the Nazi aggression towards Jews. However, he implies that he has the support of the former president because his “very much present to me and to us” (Wiesel). This insinuates that he has the support of Roosevelt in what he is suggesting for the current president, transferring the respect they held for the previous president onto him. Similarly, he manages to transfer the horror one may feel in relation to the wars, assassinations, and “bloodbaths” (Wiesel) in different places around the world. People may have less knowledge about the Holocaust than one of these other conflicts, so by listing it not only together, but on an even worse level, he finds a way to show how hard the Holocaust was in comparison.
Wiesel employs logical tactics to dissuade the idea of indifference and silence in the government by revealing the negative effects on the people of the holocaust. One of the most chilling ideas to think about for American citizens today, is that Jews escaped to America, and were actually turned away and sent back to be massacred by the Nazis. Even the smallest amount of sympathy would have saved over one thousand people from the wrath of Hitler. Being such a large amount of people, this number helps Wiesel sway his listeners towards his argument, because if America was doing the right thing, so many people should not have suffered. He also uses logic and tugs at emotions together when talking about how abandoned the Jews in the camps felt. They all believed that they were left there, unaided, because they were a secret. Logically, if any powerful country with any morals knew of their plight, it is assumed that they would send help. Surely, if they knew, they would have “spoken out” (Wiesel), but they did not. Elie Wiesel includes a dictionary definition of indifference in the beginning of the speech, saying it is simply “no difference” (Wiesel). He presents it as being wholly true, to sway the audience towards agreeing with what he believes the word entails. To him, indifference implies a lack of humanity, hatred without emotion or passion. Because of the confident manner in which he proclaims this, it is difficult for anyone listening to believe otherwise.
The pathos in the speech comes partially from where Wiesel personifies his memories of the concentration camps and brutality as a little boy who has experienced far too much to ever be happy again, as well as where he details the people in the camp and how they felt. However, the main source of empathy comes from the starvation and punishments they experienced. Wiesel begins the speech with the story of a boy, freed but forever scarred. It is clear to the audience that this is Wiesel when he was young and newly liberated. He mentions the American soldiers to establish a connection with those he is addressing. Wiesel stresses the importance of the “Gratitude” (Wiesel) that he felt towards them, and showed how even the presence of others helped lessen the burden and loneliness. It was no longer only him, there was now others to “bear witness” (Wiesel) and remember what they saw. The worst of the prisoners were called the Muselmanner, the most broken of the victims. They are those who have “lapsed into a state of despairing apathy” (forward.com). The brutality led to a complete loss of hope, until they reached the point where they “felt nothing” (Wiesel). In Wiesel’s beliefs, if one feels nothing, it is akin to being dead. So when he later comments that those who watched the Holocaust happen with indifference, he implies that they do not feel, connecting them with the lifeless shells of the Muselmanner. Not feeling, he declares in one of his more effective points, is far worse than anger or hatred. Anger and hatred can inspire emotion, action, progress, while indifference “is never creative” and “elicits no response” (Wiesel). No response, to those who are simply waiting for someone to help them, says that not only are they being tortured by one group of people, but the other does not care enough to stop them.
Wiesel views indifference as going against religion and God. If a person is indifferent, then they are going against humanity. In one of his more intense moments of the speech, he begins talking about how much worse being ignored was, versus unjustly judged. Religion may be unjust, but it is not indifferent. People cannot live “Outside God” (Wiesel), they need Him even if He is far away. To the people in the concentration camps, apathy is a “harsher punishment” (Wiesel) than anger or rage, because anger has feeling in it, while indifference just makes a suffering person feel even smaller and more insignificant. Indifference in humans potentially goes against religion, because it blurs the lines between “light and darkness” (Wiesel).
Throughout his speech at the Millennium Lectures, Elie Wiesel both enlightens on the consequences of apathy towards those who need help, and inspires hope for a better future. He wants to inspire better choices for the future presidents, and he uses a combination of logic, ethos and pathos to make his speech more effective. Wiesel sees indifference as more dangerous than any other emotion, as it both lessens a person’s humanity and distances them from their fellow people. He shows his audience how he feels through the emotions he uses when presenting his ideas, as well as painting them a picture of a young Elie Wiesel, struggling through the terrors of the Holocaust without any family, hoping only for rescue. He effectively makes his point about the dangers that come when people do not care for each other, and simultaneously calls the people to action, inspiring them to change the way America will respond to such situations in the future.